More red. More revolution.

I believe the original wording was still correct. Consider Huntmaster of the Fells

Granted the intent is different. You are only supposed to transform these ones once. However, it's still possibly given custommagic space.

That backside is way too wordy for common, is it not?

The difference between "when" and "whenever" is purely flavour and expectations. Rules-wise they're completely identical. There are plenty of ways to get "when" abilities to trigger more than once (Brink of Disaster on something indestructible, Ceremonial Guard with a regeneration shield, Aven Liberator with Master of the Veil) or indeed to have "whenever" abilities trigger only once (Beacon Hawk attacking someone with Dread).

The rule is to use "When" for something that by default will only happen once, without the intervention of other cards, and "Whenever" for something that can be expected to happen multiple times without any specific other requirement. Thus the difference between revolution's once-only transform and Huntmaster's repeated transformation is exactly the relevant difference.

To Inanimate: I can see the argument. People reckoned the Innistrad common werewolves were too complex for common, and Maro said they would have been except that the "if no spells"/"if two spells" triggers on all of them quickly coalesced from 6 lines of rules text into "standard werewolf ability".

The idea is that revolution is the same. So Revolution + "rebels ETB transformed" all coalesces into "rebel ability".

The question is really: is Act of Treason plus some other minor ability too complex for common? Threaten and Act of Treason were originally uncommon, but they've been common for a while now, and there are plenty of common Threaten effects with a minor variation - Traitorous Instinct, Portent of Betrayal, Smelt-Ward Gatekeepers etc. In particular, those which have moved rarity (Act of Treason, Traitorous Instinct) have always moved from uncommon to common.

That said, this ability is still seeing print at uncommon too, occasionally - Enthralling Victor and Turn Against most recently. This card would certainly be fine at uncommon.

Alrighty then. "When" it is.

Is the question of whether this should be a common or uncommon more of a question of our needs of our set skeleton. I would think that rebel ability Threaten would be fine, but we might want it one location or the other. I don't think we are finalizing the set yet, so I wouldn't think we would need to set anything in stone anyways.

I am more of the opinion that we need more common revolutionaries in general, hence making this a common first.

We do need red common revolutionaries, but we also need vastly more simple cards. The rules text for the backside is both difficult to interpret and incredibly wordy. If we put this at common, it's a massive red flag - if we put it at uncommon, it works very well.

I have quite a few red common revolutionaries in my playtest file which I'll be importing into Multiverse today, when I'm done working on the second part of my playtest series. With them, we should have more than enough red revolutionaries at common.